Homily
from the Mass during the Day

Today we celebrate a feast which we as Catholics tend to take for
granted: Mary, the Mother of God. It is something that we pray hundreds of
times every week, because, of course, that is how the second half of the “Hail
Mary” begins–Holy Mary, Mother of God. It is something that we just simply take
for granted and perhaps do not even think about. And it is something we
probably would assume that most other Christians take for granted. That,
however, is not true. Those who are truly orthodox will believe in this
teaching. However, there are some who call themselves orthodox Christians who do
not believe in this, and most of the non-Catholics who call themselves
Christian (that is, the Protestants) do not believe that Mary is the Mother of
God either. So we need to ask ourselves: What exactly is this feast about and
why is it so important?

Back in the year 431 at the Council of Ephesus, the Fathers of the
Church were called together to deal with a particular heresy that was picking
up a lot of steam at that time. That heresy was called Nestorianism. Now the
Church had already condemned several other heresies regarding the person of
Jesus. The Church had already condemned the idea that Jesus was just a human
person like us. The Church also had condemned the idea that Jesus is merely
God. He is the Second Person of the Trinity but He is also human, and so then
the question was: How does that work? Nestorius suggested that perhaps Jesus
was a divine person–which He is from all eternity the Second Person of the
Trinity; therefore, because He is a divine person, He has to have a divine
nature–but then Nestorius went wrong because he suggested that Jesus is also a
human person with a human nature.

The problem is that we can only be one person; you cannot be two. That
is the problem Nestorius had. He could not deal with the idea that God would
actually become man in the womb of the Virgin. He could not accept that the
person to whom Mary gave birth was God. So he suggested that Mary gave birth to
a human person, just like all other moms do, but not to a divine person.
Depending upon which form of Christianity one wants to embrace these days, some
will accept what we would call “adoptionism,” which is another heresy condemned
by the Church, that is, Jesus was such a wonderful guy that God adopted him as
His own son and made him God. It does not work. In other words, Mary gave birth
to somebody just like us, and then he became God at some point along the line.
There are other heresies that suggest Jesus did not take a human body to
Himself. Some heresies suggest that He only looked like a human body, but there
really was not one. Obviously, that does not follow either. There are other
heresies that suggest Jesus did not take a human soul to Himself. That also has
been condemned. The truth of the matter as the Church teaches it is that Jesus
Christ is a divine person who has both a divine and a human nature, one person
with two natures. He is not both a divine person and a human person.

The way the Church was able to make this
eminently clear was to declare that Mary is the Mother of God. In other words,
if the person to whom Mary gave birth is God then she is the Mother of God. Now
she is not the Mother of God in the way of suggesting that somehow God began to
exist in her womb. God exists from all eternity; He did not begin in Our Lady’s
womb. All of us, of course, begin at the moment of conception; that was not the
case for Jesus. His human nature began in the womb of His mother; His divine
nature, however, is eternal. That, again, is something that becomes a point of
confusion for some because when we think about the beginning of a human being,
we naturally think that it is somebody who did not exist and then began to
exist. Of course, every mother gives birth to a child who did not exist before
the child was conceived within her, but that is different with Jesus. The
person whom Our Lady conceived in her womb is eternal; He is God; He is the
Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity from all eternity; and He took our
human nature to Himself in the womb of the Blessed Mother. Therefore, the
person to whom Mary gave birth is truly God.

But because He had a human nature just like ours, He is also man. But,
again, we need to be careful of the distinction. He is not a human
person. He is a human being, but He is not a human person. If He were a
human person and a divine person, He would be a perfect schizophrenic. Jesus
was not. He is one person with two natures. Having two natures means that He
has two minds and two wills. You must understand that your brain is not your
mind. Your brain is merely the physical organ that allows what happens in your
mind to be able to be expressed physically. Your mind and your will are
faculties of your soul. Jesus had a human soul; therefore, He had a human mind
and He had a human will. Jesus also, of course, is God, and God is a person
(three persons to be exact); therefore, being a person, that means God also has
a mind and a will. So Jesus has a divine mind and a divine will. He has a human
mind and a human will. They did not interfere with one another. There was no
problem within Himself as to the operation. He could operate on two different
levels, on both a human level and a divine level, but with the unity of only
one person. That is the point we need to understand.

The question about Our Lady’s Divine Maternity was not so much an
understanding of Our Lady as it was of Our Lord, because the question back in
the early centuries was “Who is Jesus Christ?” and the easiest way and the most
clear way that the Fathers of the Church could make absolutely certain in an
infallible statement was to say that Mary is the Mother of God. Now the people
of Ephesus understood exactly what that meant. Even though the Fathers of the
Church were looking at the question of “Who is Jesus,” the popular devotion of
the people who loved Our Lady was so much–remember, Our Lady lived in Ephesus
with Saint John, so the people of Ephesus had a profound love for our Blessed
Lady–that after this declaration was made by the Fathers of the Council of
Ephesus, the people of the Church in Ephesus took to the streets and they
paraded, chanting Theotokos, Theotokos, which means “the God-bearer,” “the Mother of
God.” It was that particular point that the people understood, the greatest
privilege that Our Lady had. In fact, it was precisely so she could be the Mother
of God that every other privilege was given to her. That is why she was
conceived without Original Sin. That is why the extraordinary graces were given
to her so that she never sinned once in her entire life. It was for this reason
that God gave to her the profound holiness from the first moment of her
conception, and such a profound love that all of the saints and all of the
angels combined do not love God as much as our Blessed Lady does.

So when we think about this feast and we think about the fact that we
so take it for granted, we need to put it into its proper context and realize
that there was a day when it was not taken for granted. If you poll most people
who today would call themselves Christian, you will also find that this truth
is not taken for granted. It is something that is one of the most beautiful
things humanity can ever imagine, that God would become man in the womb of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, and that one of us, a human person, would give birth to
God so that we could be saved. That is what Our Lady has done. We recognize,
then, that without her fiat (that is, when she said to the angel, Let it
be done to me according to thy word), without her approval, and without her acceptance
of God’s invitation, there would be no salvation because there would be no
Savior, there would be no Church, there would be no sacraments. We would not
have Our Lord if it were not for His mother. And so we are completely indebted
to Our Lady, not only now but for all eternity we will be in her debt, and we
will be so grateful forever that Our Lady was willing to say “yes” to something
that on the natural level sounds so ludicrous and so completely impossible that
we cannot even begin to conceive the idea, that God would become man in the
womb of a human woman. Yet that is precisely what happened, and that is what we
celebrate today as we honor our Blessed Lady with her greatest privilege of
all: to be the worthy Mother of God.

e is telling us, Thisi s what I want, but I
want

*This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.